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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853-1928) was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect. He also derived the transformation equations subsequently used by Albert Einstein to describe space and time.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.

Albert Einstein is rightly considered one of the greatest scientists of all time, and his two theories of relativity - special and general - are the crowning glory of his scientific oeuvre. They have fundamentally reshaped our thinking of the most fundamental concepts - space, time and matter. These two theories have also withstood the test of time, and a century after they had been formulated they are still almost entirely used in their original formulations.

H. A. Lorentz was a distinguished physicist in his own right, and one of Einstein's closest scientific and personal friends. The special kind of the coordinate transformations that characterize the special relativity have been named after him, and he is one of the first people to whom Einstein described his general theory of relativity. In that regard he is certainly one of the foremost early authorities on the subject.

This short book primarily deals with the general theory of relativity. It was written shortly after one of the most startling predictions of the general relativity - the deflection of light by the sun - was confirmed by the British astronomer Eddington. The public was immensely fascinated by this incredible phenomenon, and there was a need for an accessible and informative explanation of general relativity. Unfortunately, even though general relativity is an incredibly "beautiful" theory in its own right, the mathematical apparatus required for its full understanding is formidable. This short introduction completely sidesteps all mathematical language and presents the subject in terms of the most fundamental concepts.

It is quite remarkable that a short popular book like this one has withstood the test of time.Read more ›

And I say "beware the General Books LLC reprint" because when you do the "Look Inside" thing, you'll read "Just so you know...This view is of the Paperback edition (2009) from WLC. The Paperback edition (2010) from General Books LLC that you originally viewed is the one you'll receive if you click the Add to Cart button at left.." And that's correct. The General Books LLC version is a completely different book. To wit....

General Books LLC puts together books using an OCR automated scanning device which can miss complete pages. There are many many Typos and no table of contents. There books receive NO EDITING of any kind, also, the OCR scanning is done by a robot (which the publishers website outright says can miss pages). This is all stated on the publishers web site (google them and read for yourself to get all the details).

Within Amazon, books are generally grouped by the same title regardless of whether there are multiple publishers - which there are for this book, as it's now copyright free. Consequently, when one of these books with multiple publishers is reviewed, you will see the reviews of other publishers versions associated with it. And as a result you need to be very careful to make sure you've bought a decent version. The version available from General Books LLC is NOT a decent version. To be quite frank, it's awful. Full of mistakes (OCR does that, when there's no actual editing to catch the software-generated mistakes), tiny font (verging on the unreadable), no table of contents, no index. By now you should get the idea.

General Books LLC are flooding Amazon with these low quality publications (450,000+ listed so far) and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews associated with the original or with better quality imprints associated with them.Read more ›

This very short book is sort of an abstract on Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Whether you're familiar, and especially if you are, about Physics and Nature's Laws of Motion, Gravity, etc...this is a worthwhile read for getting to know Einstein's theory as written by a friend physicist. It describes Einstein's theory and quashes your curiosity on the subject matter.

Short and concise, I picked up a few concepts that I was not truly aware of since grade school or high school...when I was actually enrolled in a science class. For instance, I always thought space is enveloped in a vacuum...meaning no air or nothing at all. It was not after reading this book that I was made re-aware of the gas ether as "light's medium"...or what the upper atmosphere consists of, hence the word ethereal (`not of this world).

Read further and you actually grasp the essence of the theory, said in the simplest possible way from a physicist's point of view. Right now though, I'd like to read more on the subject matter at hand...or perhaps more on Einstein himself. This is just good entry-point reading.

This book is a nice, quick entry point for people looking to learn about Einstein's famous theory.

That being said, this should not be the only source of info you use to learn about the subject. As previously mentioned, this article is about 90 years old so there is newer material to be read. That being said I never see anything wrong with starting from the beginning and working your way forward.